That was just rude. I caught myself against the side of the Kraken, then tried to catch my breath.
“Funny,” Tyco remarked, as he raised his sabre for the finish. “I expected more, from the pirate queen.”
“You’re not the only one,” I muttered under my breath, and forced myself to lurch forwards.
I NEVER PLANNEDto become a pirate queen.
But I also didn’t plan to be stripped of my rank and title for kissing another woman in public. Nor did I plan for my homeland to get embroiled in the worst civil war since the days when dragons crawled the earth. And I definitely didn’t plan to meet someone who would demand to be chained to the mast of my ship and then refuse to be let go.
Plans change, is what I’m trying to say.
MY ARMS WERE giving out. Each time I lifted my sword, my muscles burned like flaming ropes. I was done, and Tyco knew it. He slapped away my last desperate strike and pulled back ready for a thrust. I should have pivoted to the right, but I was so tired that my reflexes were nowhere. Instead, I gaped at him and tried to remember the set of heroic last words that I’d recently composed.
Then there was a flash of something in the air above Tyco’s head, something fine and swift as a dragonfly wing. Tyco could have saved himself if he had reacted instantly, but he blinked, and that was enough. The next second, he stumbled, almost dropping his sabre, and a gargling noise forced its way out of his mouth. His eyes bugged madly; his fumbling fingers reached up towards his throat, groping at the thin leather braid that was throttling him.
The cord jerked even tighter. Tyco was dragged, still gargling, up to the tips of his toes—then came a crack as someone delivered a vicious kick to the back of his left knee. The big man staggered, then fell, and the girl standing behind him let out the slack on the cord, so he crashed face-first into the deck.
I lowered my sword arm in utter relief. But the words burst out of me anyway. “I ordered you to stay back on the Banshee, Lynn!”
“Did you, Mistress?” Lynn said vaguely, as she stooped to loosen the garrote from around Tyco’s neck. “That’s not how I remember it. I think you ordered me to lurk around and strangle any ape-men who tried to slice you in half.”
“Oh, really?” I shook out my aching hand.
“Mmm-hmm. I heard you distinctly. And it turned out to be a very wise and far-sighted order, don’t you think?”
Lynn peeled up Tyco’s eyelid to reveal a blank white ball. Satisfied, she straightened, unhooked a flask from her belt, and tossed it towards me. “You ordered me to bring you some brandy, too.”
That was more like it. I took three long gulps of liquor and the heat sang all the way through me, making my numb limbs tingle.
“Better?” Lynn asked, taking the bottle back.
“Much,” I admitted. “You still shouldn’t be here. Regon shouldn’t have let you come.”
“He didn’t let me, exactly. He tried to be the voice of reason, but I threatened to belt him in the happy sack and he gave up. Then all I had to do was get over to the Kraken.”
And how, exactly, had she managed that? I was afraid I knew. Lynn’s pale hair was plastered back against her head and her clothes were sopping wet. I looked over my shoulder. Thirty yards of open water separated the two ships. “Don’t tell me you swam.”
“All right,” Lynn said obligingly. “I won’t tell you. Now can we get back to business? We are sort of in the middle of something here, you know.”
As if my hearing had suddenly returned after a spell of deafness, I heard the sounds of battle swell up all around me—cutlasses ringing against bucklers, sailors howling for their gods or for their mothers. Battle. War. Bloody death. Right. Every inch of me stung, and I wanted nothing more than to curl up on the deck for a nap, with Lynn at my side. But that indulgence would have to wait. Reluctantly, I gripped my cutlass by its red, sticky hilt.
“Will you stay out of the fight if I order you to?” I asked Lynn, almost as an afterthought, and without much hope.
“Mistress, I always obey your commands.” Lynn’s eyes fastened onto Spinner, who was in the middle of the crush of men, fighting a sailor a full foot taller than he was. “I might not hear you, though. I still have some water in my ears.”
TO BE FAIR, Lynn did stay out of the worst part of the fighting. She made two darting sallies into the thick of things to throttle men whose attention was elsewhere, and she pulped some knuckles with a well-aimed belaying pin. But when things were finally over, with the last of Tyco’s men gurgling on the deck or crumpling to their knees, she bobbed up before me as fresh and unmarked as a lady’s handkerchief.
As usual.
“That could have been worse,” she told me, as I leaned, gasping, against the Kraken’s side. “We didn’t lose as many as I expected. And you seem to have all of your important bits still attached. Are you in a lot of pain?”
I waved a hand, trying to look nonchalant. “No. I’m fine. I just need to catch my breath. Or crawl into a corner and die for a while. Finish up for me?”
“I hear and obey. Naturally.” Taking my wrist, she guided my hand into place over the deep slash that Tyco’s sabre had left in my arm. “Spinner will be by to stitch you in a minute. Keep pressure there until he comes.”
She gave my hand a squeeze, turned, drew up her shoulders, and then walked unhurriedly to the forecastle, where Tyco still lay.
She was a study, the small person who called herself my slave. For the swim to the ship, she had stripped down to a linen shirt and open-kneed breeches. They were more or less dry by now, but they still made her look waif-like, especially since her feet were bare, and her hair close cropped. Weaponless, unarmoured, she looked utterly out of place amongst all that leather and steel. Yet she picked her way between the pools of blood with composure.
Lynn reached Tyco just as he was beginning to twitch and blink. “Latoya?” she called, nudging the big man with her toe. “I could use some help.”
Latoya was a recent find—we’d picked her up in a raid down south—and she was worth her considerable weight in gold and cinnamon. She came from Tavar, that brutal stretch of sandy waste where you only survived by being good at just about everything. Latoya herself had been a hunter, a desert tracker, a circus wrestler, a camel-tamer, and a leatherworker, all before her twenty-sixth birthday. Eventually, she made her way north to the Ughaion River and spent a few years as a bargeman. That was where we found her and convinced her that a life of piracy would offer more scope for her many talents. Near seven feet high and built like a granite cliff, she battled every kind of danger, from raiders to thunderstorms, with the same unflinching calm. She was also about ten times better than I was at the brain-twisting mathematics involved in navigation, which was something I was trying hard to be mature about, without a whole lot of success.
I had hired Latoya to be bosun of the Banshee, but she had quietly appointed herself as bodyguard to both me and Lynn and watched over us as if we were slightly stupid children.
Latoya coiled the chain she used as a weapon, draped it over her shoulder, and jogged up to Tyco. In one motion, she twisted his arms together behind his back, then forced him to kneel upright. It brought his face almost level with Lynn’s.
“Tyco Gorgionson,” Lynn began, “you were warned that this would happen.”
He tried to struggle. That was pointless. Latoya held him still without even changing expression. When he found his tongue, he was as eloquent as men usually are in such a position. “You fucking bitch,” he gasped.
“Ah,” Lynn said, “a poet. If only you had decided to explore that side of your personality during the war.”
Spinner appeared beside me, threading a needle with seal gut. “Don’t get in my line of sight,” I muttered at him. “This is going to be good.”
Tyco still hadn’t learned. He was trying to thrash his way out of Latoya’s iron hold, and flecks of foam were appearing on his lips. His eyes rolled wildly until they fastened on me.
“I won’t kill you, Darren!” he screamed. “You hear me? You won’t be that lucky! I’ll slice you up, and I’ll do it in front of your little whore—I’ll take your eyes, your fucking tongue, I’ll—”
Lynn snapped then. She gave Latoya a nod, and Latoya hoisted the struggling man a crucial four inches higher. Lynn always kicked with her heel, not her toes, because she almost never wore shoes. But her technique was superb, all the same. With a quick snap of her leg, she applied her foot to the exact part of Tyco’s groin where it would do the most good. He screeched, tears spurting.
“You have a thing about slicing people up, don’t you?” Lynn went on when he quieted. “You did it just last week, to a girl of sixteen near Retlio, and my mistress had to sit with her as she died. My mistress couldn’t even hold the girl’s hand at the end, because you’d taken those from her too. Does that ring a bell? Do you remember that girl? Or have there been too many to count? You were warned, Tyco Gorgionson, you were warned. There’s law in the islands again. One law. The law of my mistress.”
Tyco twisted so he could look at me again. “You want to kill me, you fucking coward? Face me yourself!”
Lynn kicked him in the kidneys this time, and again he crumpled.
“Why are you looking at her?” Lynn asked. “She’s not going to kill you. Why not? Because you don’t deserve to have any bragging rights in hell. You won’t be able to tell the other ghosts that the pirate queen sent you. You’ll have to admit that you had your throat slit by a slave. A girl. The least of Darren’s servants. Not much to boast about, is it, on the other side?”
Tyco’s face had turned grey, and sweat ran down it freely. Lynn let him wait a few seconds.
“But my mistress doesn’t make martyrs,” she said. “And she doesn’t kill dogs that she can tame with a stick. You won’t die today, but I promise you won’t enjoy what happens next. You’re done, Tyco. It’s over. Latoya, put him out for me.”
Latoya freed one hand and gave a sharp rap to the top of Tyco’s head. He thudded down to the deck, dropping, as so many men had dropped in the past year, by Lynn’s feet.
“BEHOLD,” LYNN SAID, as she returned to my side. “Finished.”
“Almost,” I agreed. I had my breath back now. “One more thing. Now the unpleasantness is over, can I have my garrote back?”
Her forehead wrinkled innocently. “What do you mean?”
I pointed. “That is my garrote.”
She glanced at it. “Is it? I guess you put it in my pocket by mistake.”
“You don’t have pockets. You were wearing it wrapped around your wrist.”
“I guess you wrapped it around my wrist by mistake. Really, Mistress, that was very thoughtless of you. I can’t spend all my time lugging your weapons around.”
I put out my free hand, the one attached to the arm that Spinner wasn’t stitching up. “Give it back.”
“Nah, that’s all right,” Lynn said, breezing past me as she wrapped the garrote back around her wrist. “I don’t mind suffering a bit in the service of my overlord. Corto, get us underway. We should drop these thugs off before evening.”
Corto automatically reached for the helm, but I glared at him. “I do still give the orders around here, don’t I?”
Corto cleared his throat and waited.
“ . . . get us underway,” I muttered sulkily, and then winced as Spinner’s needle dug deep. “Don’t I get to do anything fun, now that I’m an overlord?”
“Not really,” Lynn said. “I get to do the fun things. It’s the paltry reward I get for my selfless service towards you.”
“That, and you get to steal my stuff.”
“That too.”
She gave me a comforting pat on the shoulder and trotted away. Spinner let out a low whistle as he knotted off the thread in my arm. “You know. Sometimes you have to wonder where that girl comes from.”
And that was the thing. I did wonder. I wondered every day.
CHAPTER TWO
IMAGINE THIS. YOU wake up, scratch, roll over, find yourself face to face with a sleeping woman, and realize that you have no idea who she is. How often does that happen to a person?
Well—actually, I guess it happens quite a bit. But those situations usually involve far too much wine, and maybe some mushrooms, and a number of slurred, drunken compliments, and, the next morning, an awkward race to find your trousers and escape before the sun comes up.
I, on the other hand, had woken up that way every day for sixteen months. I had woken up that way ever since the morning I came across a scruffy, half-starved girl in a burned-out fishing village, who challenged me to a duel, lost resoundingly, and somehow ended up as my slave rather than my passenger. Which definitely had never been the plan.
But plans, as I say, change.
I always knew that she wasn’t ordinary.
I knew it just from that first encounter. Ordinary peasants don’t mouth off to noblewomen like me. Ordinary peasants scuff their feet and tug their forelocks and hope not to be noticed. Whereas Lynn shoved her way to the front of the crowd and demanded attention. As if she was used to it. As if she expected it.
That was the first warning. But it got more and more blatant as the weeks wore on.
I don’t think she ever realized all the signs she gave. It wasn’t just the obvious stuff, like how she could read and write and clobber me at koro with only half her mind on the game. It was more the little things. The words she used, the way she walked; her fearless stare, her posture. However secretive she tried to be—and believe me, she tried—she couldn’t hide her differences. Even when she was bound in iron fetters and dressed in rags, Lynn had the air of a lady about her.
A million times, I squinted at Lynn, imagining her with long hair and decent clothing. Dressed that way, in my mind’s eye, she looked like any of the girls I had grown up with at the court of my father, Lord Stribos. And I couldn’t shake the conviction that she must have grown up at court herself.
Then came the business with Mara. At the end of that long, confusing day, when I found myself still alive, if rather dented, I had no idea what to believe. In that desperate minute when my deranged cousin was about to slash me to fish bait, and Lynn stepped in to distract her, had she told a bare-faced lie or an even more bare-faced truth?
This was what it all came down to. It was just possible that the girl who called herself my slave was actually the Lady Ariadne of the House of Bain, heir to an absolutely obscene amount of wealth and power.
But if Lynn was Ariadne, she wasn’t about to admit it to me.
I DID MY best not to pry, I really did. People end up on the sea for all kinds of reasons. A good part of the time, they’re running from something. My own past involved a humiliating banishment and a painful break-up, both of which I was doing my best to forget when I met Lynn. She had made it very clear that she didn’t want to be interrogated. So I told myself to let it go until she was ready to talk.
A good plan, that was. A sensible plan. Except for one thing. Lynn showed no sign that she would be ready to talk any time in the next century, and the waiting was driving me around the bend. I’m not a patient person, I admit it, but I think you would have been a bit edgy yourself if you were in my shoes.
I was born to a ruling house. In the law of Kila, I was as far removed from peasants as a ruby is from acorns. Yet there were other lords who were equally far above me in station. There were hundreds of Kilan nobles back then, but at any given time, there were only three or four families who truly mattered. And the House of Bain was one of them. It ruled the massive north island of Bero, which had the diamond mines and the best of the silver deposits. Its fleet was the best in the nation. You were a fool not to be scared out of your wits if you saw warships bearing its white banners.
Yes, it was a powerhouse, except in one crucial way. The lord of Bain, Iason, had only one child.
It was surprising, to say the least. For any Kilan noble, the highest and purest duty was to secure the survival o
f his line. Most lords would father as many children as their wives could breastfeed without being chewed raw, and then a few more for good measure. I myself had about fourteen sisters and brothers (they were hard to count, they moved around so fast.) It was insanely risky to beget one single heir. If Ariadne caught the plague or fell off a cliff, then Iason was finished, doomed to be toppled from his throne by the more ambitious of his dukes and generals. As the sole hope for the Bain legacy, the girl must have spent her entire childhood under heavy guard, swaddled away from everyone and everything.
So how had she gotten away from the castle on the northern isle? How had she ended up in the fishy little town where I found her? And what the hell was Iason doing about it now?
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